It was the movie’s ending that did it. The von Trapps climbing through the Alps to escape the Nazis, a unit of togetherness, a family. The way she presented it to my father was, we don’t want to be alone when we’re old, do we? No, my father agreed, we shouldn’t grow old alone.
She spent two years trying to get pregnant. No luck. And then she was forty, and suddenly hungry for babies, starved for babies. She began taking human menopausal gonadotropin—a new drug at the time—to encourage ovulation, and it worked. At forty-one she was pregnant, not with one baby, not with two babies, but with three babies. Just what she’d wanted! She prepared to sew matching play clothes cut cleverly from curtains.
Both Mom and Dad had small inheritances, which they combined to buy the house on Wolf Island. Their dream house, they said, even though the wind blew through cracks in the wall, the floorboards were full of sand, the roof sagged and leaked. They liked the huge kitchen overlooking the bay, the big lawn with a tire swing already tied to the branch of a tree. A house with plenty of room. A house meant for children.
They were moving to a place that was gloriously out of the way. What they liked best was the sense of adventure. They would have three children, but they were young at heart. No suburban cul-de-sac. No PTA potlucks and Tupperware parties! My father would commute to Boston, where he’d been appointed dean of a tiny college. Eventually he hoped to write full-time.
We looked like beans on the ultrasound monitor, she told us, three little beans of light in the dark. They called us Baby A, B, and C. I was A, Lucas C, and the other baby was B. We were born too early, at thirty-two weeks, struggling into the world: me, then Colin, and finally Lucas. We were skinny, our stick-bones visible through translucent skin. Lucas and I weighed less than four pounds, and Baby B was even smaller. Our miniature mouths didn’t yet know how to nurse. Doctors dripped milk into our stomachs through tubes in our noses. Our lungs were reluctant to breathe out of water, but only Baby B needed a tube for that as well.
For weeks, our mother believed we were dying. She sat in the NICU day after day, her hair turning gray, her bones losing density.
After one month in the NICU, we turned some corner finally, our lungs and hearts and stomachs working efficiently in our tiny bodies. We drank from bottles. We grew. They brought us home to Wolf Island. And we lived all together in the big house on the bay for three weeks, until Baby B developed pneumonia, which was common in premature babies, the doctors told my parents.
He died in the night. My mother was alone with him when it happened. She’d tried to take him over to the mainland on the evening ferry, but he didn’t make it to the hospital. I didn’t like to picture him in her arms, seven weeks old, the cold wind as the ferry ripped along, all of them—mother, baby, and boat—chasing his disappearing breath.
They buried him in the island cemetery and lady’s slippers sprang up on the mound of earth under the shady branches of the encroaching woods. The flowers returned year after year, their delicate swelling like some sad secret the earth was telling. They were beautiful in a way that nothing else we knew was beautiful, their pale fleshiness, dark pink veins. In childhood, we went every year to plant more, transplanting them from the woods around the Day Estate, even after we didn’t need to. They flourished, spread, a lovely rash creeping from Baby B’s earth to the other grassy graves, the color densest beside the headstone that said SON~BROTHER.
He had broken my mother’s heart, that was clear to us. Although his body was buried in the earth under all those flowers, he never really passed away the way the dead should. He hung around on the fringes of our consciousness all the time.
* * *
In the dimly lit kitchen—only a single bulb over the sink—I watched my brother’s eyes, huge, glassy. “It’s Baby B,” he said.
The stranger held still as if afraid to break a spell. His eyes moved from me to Lucas.
“Lucas, Baby B is dead,” I said.
“I’ve been dreaming about him every night,” Lucas said. “I could sense him getting closer, and I thought there was something I was supposed to do. But it wasn’t me after all. You were the one who had to bring him here.”
“He’s a stranger, Lu. I met him tonight at the inn.”
“Then how do you explain this?” Lucas pointed at Cole’s ankle—at a small tattoo I hadn’t noticed. “Lady’s slipper.”
We both looked at Cole. “I got that when I was twenty-one,” he said.
“Why that particular flower?” I asked.
“Why? Because it’s beautiful, and rare. And it was someone’s favorite flower—someone I loved. Sorry, what is going on? Who’s Baby B?” A flush had risen from his neck to his cheeks. His eyes black, bright.
“He was our brother,” I said. “Sorry, maybe it’s time for you to go.”
“No,” Lucas said. “Don’t go! Here, sit down. I’ll get a beer for you, and we’ll tell you about Baby B. We’ll tell you the whole story.”
It was disorienting to see Lucas talking with a stranger, Lucas who sometimes couldn’t even say hi to Eddie, or the Grendles, or Jim Cardoza, people he’d known his whole life. I felt dizzy, as if the room were tilting around me.
“I’m always up for a story,” Cole said, sitting at the table. Lucas popped the tab on a PBR and set it in front of Cole.
“I need to sit, too,” I said, and they pulled out a chair for me.
We were up all night, and the biggest surprise of all was that Lucas talked most of that time. It was as if something had come uncorked, and stories were pouring out of him.
“His name was Colin,” Lucas said. “I mean even your name is similar.”
“That’s just a coincidence,” I said.
“Did you feel anything?” Lucas asked me. “When you first saw each other, I mean? Did you have any idea?”
“I did,” the stranger said. “I felt something right away.”
“Of course I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “Because there’s nothing to feel.”
“Don’t worry,” Lucas said. “She’s always like this at first.”
“Like what?” I said. But I knew what he meant. Practical—trying to tether him to earth. He resented that. But look what happened when I slipped up, when I forgot myself for one night, tried to bring a stranger home. It was like I was pretending to be someone else, someone without responsibilities. Look how that worked out. I felt my heart beating, felt warmth crawling up the back of my neck, sweat prickling my scalp.
Just before sunrise, Cole went away down the chilly beach promising to come back later that day. Lucas and I stood on the screened-in porch, watched him disappear down the shore. Just before the second jetty, he stopped and found a stone in the sand, skipped it even though it was too dark to see its skittering path through the water.
“Did you see that?” Lucas said.
“It doesn’t mean anything. A lot of people skip stones.”
“In that exact place?”
As long as I could remember, Lucas had stopped at the second jetty to skip one stone. For good luck. For Baby B. I never knew why he did it. But in my memory, I could see him at all these different ages, five years old, ten years old, eighteen, twenty-five. That same flick of the wrist. Stone after stone.
Lucas tipped his head back and finished his beer. For some reason neither of us wanted to go to bed. We sat on the porch until the grainy light of dawn made visible the dock and the jetties and the boats in the bay. I looked at Lucas and felt a deep ache in my chest—love swelling to enormous proportions inside my ribs. I loved him so much. I wanted to give him everything he wanted. A brother returned from the dead. Our parents, too. If I’d known how to do it, what to sacrifice, I would have without hesitation.
It was ironic that our parents had decided to have children so they wouldn’t be alone when they were old. It turned out they didn’t need to worry about growing old at all. Dad h
ad a heart attack when we were in seventh grade. Mom died eight years later from breast cancer. Ever since, just Lucas and me. Alone on the island, alone in the big house they bought for us and Baby B.
Early light crept into the porch where we sat, lighting up the table and chairs, the wicker sofa, chenille blanket, potted plants. Everything was in place, but everything felt different. Bhone Bay was out there doing what it always did, tide creeping out, revealing damp raw sand, black seaweed. The red houseboat was anchored where it always was. The light was the same light. The sound of the bay was the same sound.
But we felt different now, already revised in some indefinable way. How amazing the change one day can bring, one chance meeting. Or—maybe it wasn’t so amazing. After all, we’d spent a lifetime longing for something—or someone—we could never have. That longing had created a space in us, in our lives. And Cole, in ways I didn’t yet understand, seemed to fit into that space, filling it like a missing puzzle piece.
4
Our relationship with Baby B had been complicated, and it changed over time like any relationship, but one thing remained constant: he was always real to us. We knew about him as soon as we were old enough to know anything. We had four photos of Baby B, but only one of the three of us together, the ultrasound photo, which my mother had stuck up on the fridge with magnets. She used to point to the little beans and say, “There you are, and there you are, and there’s Baby B.”
My mother never seemed to fully recover, from losing a child, or from having them. Our existence exhausted her. We were never the von Trapp family, not Lucas and me. We didn’t sing, we cried. We howled. We were messy. We had bad dispositions. As we grew, we sometimes caught a look of disappointment on our mother’s face. Then we thought the same thing: the other baby would have been lovely, neat, affectionate. The other baby would not have disappointed her.
We were too young to know that what we were seeing on her face wasn’t disappointment, but lifelong sorrow, the kind that chisels its way into every movement, posture, and expression. It was all too easy to project any feeling of unworthiness onto Baby B. We saw so clearly what life would have been like if he had lived. My mother’s perpetual exhaustion would lift like fog burning off the water. My parents would stop looking at us with mystified, resentful expressions. They loved us, we knew, and they loved each other, but they were unhappy on some level that we never made sense of.
From the moment we could dream, we dreamed about Baby B. In Lucas’s dreams he was bright and alive, but nonsensical. He slid down banisters and snake holes, drove giant cars and reindeer, hid in cellars and knotholes. Lucas followed him through rooms that opened into other rooms. Chased him along strange beaches, where he disappeared into a series of underwater caves, his feet—or maybe fins—flashing behind him.
My dreams were logical, like me. In my dreams, we were in a classroom and a teacher was calling roll, and Colin was there along with the other children, raising his hand, saying here. My subconscious was forever trying to line us up, put everyone in order. Lucas’s subconscious was attempting to break the rules of reality, create a world in which Colin could return. Those were the ways we dealt with loss, even as children.
But it wasn’t just that we missed him. There’s a kind of peace in missing someone you’ll never see again. We didn’t have that peace. There was always a sense that we might see him again. Lucas believed with all his heart that Baby B would come back to us. And he wasn’t alone. My mother believed it, too. And maybe I did as well, some small unruly fraction of my psyche that rebelled against order and logic.
“He’s a spirit now,” my mother used to say. “He lives in the air all around us. He’s waiting to be born to us again.”
We’d thought she meant she was having another baby.
“No. I can’t have any more babies,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Lucas said. “He can wait for Lydia.”
The notion that our brother, Baby B, who we knew from dreams, could exist inside my body, having somehow gotten in, and needing someday to get out, filled me with panic and—because it’s the nature of humans to be conflicted—longing.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“In Japan, they’re called mizuko,” my mother said. “Water babies. They float around us in the spirit world, waiting for a chance to be born again. I feel him everywhere I go.”
“Water baby,” Lucas said, laughing.
“Water baby,” my mother said.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it: the idea of sex, that wondrous, frightening unknown all mixed up with the idea of pregnancy, and all of that mixed up with the idea of a hovering baby brother who haunted us, wanting to be born.
“He’s patient,” my mother told us. “He’ll wait until the time is right.”
This was how Lucas learned to believe the unbelievable, from our mother, a champion believer. After we were born, and Baby B died, she not only believed in psychotherapy and chiropractic, she believed in acupuncture, homeopathy, past life regression, and soul retrieval. She believed in the power of yoga, astrology, tarot, and craniosacral therapy. Each belief replaced the one before. When she moved on to a new belief—soul retrieval for instance—her fervor for the previous belief dimmed and gradually faded out of the framework of her life. This search lasted until she died. She had an entourage of women her age who were looking for health, meaning, a sense of well-being, power, purpose, or reassurance. She was always searching, scouring—for something we couldn’t give her.
I was a teenager when she was at the height of her self-searching. The things that glowed bright and holy for her never did for me. But I learned from her that belief was a way of exploring the world. Belief brought you to the edges of what might be, rather than keeping you safe in the insular is. It was an act of courage to believe, she thought. Lucas thought so, too.
No wonder Lucas spent so much time trying to bring him back to us. Lucas began turning lights on for Baby B when we were still tiny. Three years old. Four years old. He left a night-light on in the hallway in case Baby B came back in the night. Then he started leaving the bathroom light on. Then the hallway light, the kitchen light, the closet light.
“We can’t sleep when the lights are on,” my parents told him.
“How will he find the house in the dark?” Lucas asked.
“He doesn’t need to see,” my mother said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Do you know that for sure?” he asked, and of course she didn’t.
Then he would forget about the lights for a while. A couple years later, the lights would be on again. He’d turn them all on after my parents had gone to bed. Or he’d play music for Baby B. Lucas opened all the windows and blasted Nina Simone—“Here Comes the Sun” and “Mr. Bojangles” because those were the songs Baby B liked. How did Lucas know Baby B liked those songs? Good question. We were ten when he started playing Nina Simone. Always with the windows open, as if Baby B were a bird who might alight on the sill. Always full blast. “He’s not deaf, he’s dead,” I used to tell him.
Or he would bake for Baby B. Cinnamon cookies, the spice of them filling the kitchen, drifting out the open windows.
The lighthouse was like the world’s tallest candle. Lucas climbed up to be closer to his brother. He climbed to be closer to that light calling him home. He was a sucker for a beacon.
My mother didn’t exactly encourage him, but she had her own rituals for remembering Baby B. She lit candles, burned incense. Sang to him on our birthday. The way I saw it, they were complicit. She said she could feel him close by sometimes, and Lucas believed her.
What did I believe? I wasn’t sure. When the stranger came, we were twenty-eight years old. We’d been orphans for almost ten years. We’d been happy, but we’d been lonely. We’d both longed for more.
* * *
Cole came to the booth at lunchtime. He leaned his elbows on
the counter. I made a mental list of what I saw: jaw stubble, Adam’s apple, bitten fingernails, crease between his eyes from squinting or from worry.
“Maybe this goes without saying,” I said, “but given the turn of events, I think we better keep things—friendly—between us.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “Very disappointing.”
“I’m sure you’ll survive the disappointment.”
“We’ll see.”
“And I’m sorry about Lucas—”
“I like Lucas.”
“I just mean all this stuff about Baby B.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m intrigued.”
“That’s good, because I have a favor to ask you.”
“Now I’m really intrigued.”
“He’s just so happy,” I said. “I mean the happiest I’ve seen him in...well, maybe ever. I’m asking you to—go along—just for a little while.”
“You want me to pretend I’m Baby B?”
“No! I know that’s crazy. But maybe you could not mention to Lucas just how crazy it is.”
“And you think this is good for him?”
“It’s not good for him to sulk around at home day in and day out, that’s for sure. I mean, if you’d seen him before—”
With one finger, Cole touched the top of my hand. “Stop,” he said. His fingertip was hot, burned a little spot on the skin of my hand. I felt strangely close to him, as if we’d been through something big together—me, and Cole, and Lucas, too—an adventure, a trial. “I’ve already told Lucas I’m coming for dinner,” Cole said. “I’ll see you, too.”
“Well, thank you,” I said. “I mean, this will mean a lot to Lucas.”
After the four o’clock ferry left for the cape, I walked home along the beach. This was the time of year when afternoon lasted all evening. The sun was still warm, and I cast a long shadow on the sand. Those moments on the beach as I walked home always seemed to me bright and angular, moments of intense order and symmetry. In front of our house, I stopped with my feet in the warm sand, picturing what I might find inside—Cole, Lucas, conversation, laughter, the opposite of loneliness. Who was this man, who swept in like an intimate storm, changing the atmosphere of our home? How could a stranger bring about this kind of sea change?
Goodnight Stranger Page 3